08 JUNE 02: A LITTLE
POTASSIUM IODIDE FOR YOUR TROUBLES…

from cnn.com:

County issues thousands
of anti-radiation pills

June 8, 2002 Posted: 10:03
PM EDT (0203 GMT)

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, New York
(CNN) — A suburban New York county Saturday handed out thousands of pills
meant to give residents limited protection from radiation in case of disaster
at a nearby nuclear power plant.

    Westchester
County officials are giving out free potassium iodine tablets, known as
“KI,” to anyone who lives within 10 miles of the Indian Point nuclear power
plant, about 35 miles north of New York City. About 140,000 people live
in that 10-mile radius.

    People
lined up outside a Yorktown Heights school to pick up the pills, which
can prevent thyroid cancer, if taken within 24-hours of a nuclear exposure.
The pill works by preventing the thyroid gland from absorbing radiation.

    Officials
said the pills would protect people long enough for them to be evacuated
from the area, but they warn that it is not a panacea. Westchester County
spokeswoman Victoria Hochman told The Associated Press that 2,617 people
had picked up 10,533 KI pills by the end of the day Saturday.

    “These
are not protecting against everything in a nuclear accident. I think that
is really important to emphasize,” said Dr. Loren Wissner Greene, a thyroid
specialist at New York University Medical Center. “What it does do is decrease
the ability of the thyroid gland to pick up this radioactive iodine, which
can cause a high instance of thyroid cancer, especially in young children.”

    Indian
Point’s owner, the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., says that its plant
is designed with multiple safety systems, and the prospect of an accident
that would threaten the public is “unlikely.”

   
Joseph Ruffino, who brought his two young daughters to pick up the pills,
said the whole thing was kind of surreal.

   
“It’s hard to believe this is your daily reality these days, but it is,”
he said.

   
The pill giveaway also attracted anti-nuclear activists who said the only
way to protect the community is to close the plant.

   
Ruffino said he had much more respect for the protesters now than he did
in the past.

   
“I looked at them very differently, no doubt about it,” he said.

    New York
State received 1.2 million pills to give to people who live near the plant.
Twelve other states that have nuclear reactors have also requested the
pills from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Maryland and Vermont were
the first states to give them out, The Associated Press reported.

    Dozens
of pharmacies in the county are selling the pills to people who live more
than 10 miles from the plant, according to the county’s Web site.

07 JUNE 02:  PIER
LUIGI COLLINA: THE GREATEST REF IN THE WORLD

From the June
10, 2002 issue of New York Magazine.

 

Facing the Music

Rock stars and music-industry
execs once ruled the earth, but now — in terms of size and profit margins
— the music industry is becoming the book business (minus the literacy).

BY MICHAEL WOLFF

Hemingway had rock-star status
(and even impersonators). Steinbeck was Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt
Cobain. Dorothy Parker was Courtney Love. James Jones was David Crosby.
Mailer was Eminem. This is to say — and I understand how hard this is
to appreciate — that novelists were iconic for much of the first half
of the last century. They set the cultural agenda. They made lots of money.
They lived large (and self-medicated). They were the generational voice.
For a long time, anybody with any creative ambition wanted to write the
Great American Novel.

    But starting
in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in the sixties, rock-and-roll
performers eclipsed authors as cultural stars. Rock and roll took over
fiction’s job as the chronicler and romanticizer of American life (that
rock and roll became much bigger than fiction relates, I’d argue, more
to scalability and distribution than to relative influence), and the music
business replaced the book business as the engine of popular culture.

    Now,
though, another reversal, of similar commercial and metaphysical magnitude,
is taking place. Not, of course, that the book business is becoming rock
and roll, but that the music industry is becoming, in size and profit margins
and stature, the book business.

    n other
words, there’ll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen King), but even
if you’re fairly high up on the music-business ladder, most of your time,
which you’d previously spent with megastars, will be spent with mid-list
stuff. Where before you’d be happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon
you’ll be grateful if you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units
— that will be your bread and butter. You’ll sweat every sale and dollar.
Other aspects of the business will also contract — most of the perks and
largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamour, the influence,
the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs — gone. Instead, it will
be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly anachronistic business, catering
to an aging clientele, without much impact on an otherwise thriving culture
awash in music that only incidentally will come from the music industry.

    This
glum (if also quite funny) fate is surely the result of compounded management
errors — the know-nothingness and foolishness and acting-out that, for
instance, just recently resulted in what seems to be the final death of
Napster.

    But it’s
way larger, too. Management solutions in the music business have, rightly,
given way to a pure, no-exit kind of fatalism.

    It’s
all pain. It’s all breakdown. Music-business people, heretofore among the
most self-satisfied and self-absorbed people of the age, are suddenly interesting,
informed, even ennobled, as they become fully engaged in the subject of
their own demise. Producers, musicians, marketing people, agents . . .
they’ll talk you through what’s happened to their business — it’s part
B-school case study and part Pilgrim’s Progress.

    Start
with radio.

    Radio
and rock and roll have had the most remarkable symbiotic relationship in
media — the synergy that everybody has tried to re-create in media conglomerates.
Radio got free content; music labels got free promotion.

    Radio’s
almost effortless cash flow, and mom-and-pop organization (there were once
5,133 owners of U.S. radio stations), made it ripe for consolidation, which
began in the mid-eighties and was mostly completed as soon as Congress
removed virtually all ownership limits in 1996. A handful of companies
now control nearly the entirety of U.S. radio, with Clear Channel and its
more than 1,200 stations being the undisputed Death Star. (Clear Channel
is also one of the nation’s major live promoters, and uses its airtime
leverage to force performers to use its concert services, as Britney Spears
and others have charged.)

    Radio,
heretofore ad hoc and eccentric and local, underwent a transformation in
which it became formatted, rational, and centralized. Its single imperative
was to keep people from moving the dial — seamlessness became the science
of radio.

    The music
business suddenly had to start producing music according to very stringent
(if unwritten) commercial guidelines (it could have objected or rebelled
— but it rolled over instead; what’s more, in a complicated middleman
strategy of music brokers and independent promoters, labels have, in effect,
been forced to pay to have their boring music aired). Format became law.
Everything had to sound the way it was supposed to sound. Fungibility was
king. Familiarity was the greatest virtue.

    Once
Sheryl Crow was an established hit, the music business was compelled to
offer up an endless number of Sheryl Crow imitators. Then when the Sheryl
Crow imitators became a reliable radio genre, Sheryl Crow was compelled
to imitate them. (Entertainment Weekly, without irony, recently praised
the new Moby album for sounding like his last.)

    But then,
just as radio playlists become closely regulated, the Internet appears.

    “Suddenly
there was another distribution avenue offering far greater product range,”
notes my friend Bob Thiele, who’s been producing, writing, performing,
and doing A&R work in L.A. for twenty years (and whose father was Buddy
Holly’s producer), and who, in my memory, never before talked about avenues
of distribution. “And then, before anyone was quite aware of what was happening,
file-sharing replaced radio as the engine of music culture.”

    It wasn’t
just that it was free music — radio offered free music. But whatever you
wanted was free (whenever you wanted it). The Internet is music consumerism
run amok, resulting not only in billions of dollars of lost sales but in
an endless bifurcation of taste. The universe fragmented into sub-universes,
and then sub-sub-universes. The music industry, which depends on large
numbers of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had
to deal with an ever-growing numbers of fans with increasingly diverse
and eccentric interests.

    It is
hard to think of a more profound business crisis. You’ve lost control of
the means of distribution, promotion, and manufacturing. You’ve lost quality
control — in some sense, there’s been a quality-control coup. You’ve lost
your basic business model — what you sell has become as free as oxygen.

    It’s
a philosophical as well as a business crisis — which compounds the problem,
because the people who run the music business are not exactly philosophers.

    “They’re
thugs,” says a former high-ranking music exec of my acquaintance, who is
no shrinking violet himself.

    Such
thuggishness, when the business was about courting difficult acts, enforcing
contracts, procuring drugs, paying off everyone who needed to be paid off,
may once have been a key management advantage. But it probably isn’t the
main virtue you’re looking for when you’re in a state of existential crisis.
Being street-smart is not being smart.

    In a
situation of such vast uncertainty, with the breakdown of all prior business
and cultural assumptions, you don’t necessarily want to have to depend
upon, say, Tommy Mottola to create a new paradigm.

    For a
long while, the management response at the major labels had a weird combination
of denial and foot stamping: putting Napster out of business-then sort-of/sort-of-not
buying Napster — all the while being told by everybody who knows anything
about technology that, no matter what the music industry does, or who it
sues, music will be, inevitably, free. Duh. There is, too, a management
critique — perhaps most succinctly put by Don Henley in his now-famous
post-Grammy letter wherein he quoted Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles: “Gentlemen,
gentlemen! We’ve got to protect our phony baloney jobs!” — that sees record
labels as generally engaged in the usual practice of ripping off anyone
who can be ripped off while remaining oblivious to the fact that Rome is
burning.

    But for
the most part, denial, and even the reflex to just keep squeezing the last
dollar until there is nothing left to squeeze, is passing (labels have
even recently awoken to the problems of dealing with the radio behemoths
and are frantically, and way too late, trying to find reasons to sue the
radio guys and gain back a little leverage).

    I had
a very nice sushi lunch in the Sony dining room the other day where I heard
about the generally gallows mood at Sony Music. The recent past was very
bad; the future was likely to be worse. All money earned from here on in
would be harder to earn. This felt like acceptance to me: We simply don’t
know what to do.

    The truth
is, there might not be anything much to do.

    Here
are the choices:

    If you’re
providing free entertainment, which is obviously what the music business
is doing, then you have to figure out some way to sell advertising to the
people who are paying attention to your free music. But nobody seems to
have any idea how that might be done. Or you can provide stuff that’s free,
and use the free stuff to promote something else of more value that people,
you hope, will buy — now called the “legitimate alternative.” (Putting
video on the CD is one of those ideas — though, of course, you can file-share
video too.) Or sell the CD at a level that makes it cheap enough to compete
with free (free, after all, has its own costs for the consumer).

    It’s
a spreadsheet solution. There will continue to be a market for selling
music, however diminished — but it will have to be cheaper music. Margins
will shrink even more. Accordingly, costs will have to shrink. Spending
a few million to launch an act will shortly be a thing of the past. (The
formal catalyst of the beginning of the end of big development costs may
be the Wall Street Journal’s story a few months
ago that precisely accounted for the $2.2 million launch costs of a singer
named Carly Hennessy, who went on to sell 378 CDs.) A&R
guys making half a million are also history (in the future, they’ll start
at $40,000 and max out at $150,000). And no more parties.

    And then
there is the CD theory. This theory is widely accepted — with great pride,
in fact — in the music industry. It represents the ultimate music-biz
hustle. But its implications are seldom played out.

    The CD
theory holds that the music business actually died about twenty years ago.
It was revived without anyone knowing it had actually died because compact-disc
technology came along and everybody had to replace what they’d bought for
the twenty years prior to the advent of the CD.

    The music
business, this theory acknowledges, is about selling technology as much
as music. From mono to stereo to Walkman. It just happens that the next
stage of technological development in the music business has largely excluded
the music business itself.

    The further
implication, though, might be the more interesting and painful one: You
can’t depend on just the music.

    Rock
and roll is just an anomaly. While for a generation or two it created a
go-go industry — the youthquake — it is unreasonable to expect that anything
so transforming can remain a permanent condition. To a large degree, the
music industry is, then, a fluke. A bubble. Finally the bubble burst.

    But not
with a pop. It’s an almost imperceptible, but highly meaningful, alteration
in context. Alanis Morissette becomes Grace Paley. Bono becomes John Hersey.
Fiona Apple is Joyce Carol Oates. Moby is Martin Amis.

    This
is not so bad.

    And best
of all, our children — all right, our grandchildren — won’t want to become
rock stars.

05 JUNE 02: “What was
motivating those officials?”

Ralph Nader urges NBA to review officiating

San
Francisco Chronicle Staff Report

Wednesday, June 5, 2002

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader
and the League of Fans, a sports-industry watchdog, sent a letter to NBA
Commissioner David Stern on Tuesday urging a review of the officiating
in the aftermath of the “notorious” refereeing in Game 6 of the Western
Conference finals between the Kings and the Lakers in L.A.

    “At a
time when the public’s confidence is shaken by headlines reporting the
breach of trust by corporate executives, it is important, during the public’s
relaxation time, for there to be maintained a sense of impartiality and
professionalism in commercial sports performances,” the letter said. “That
sense was severely broken . . . during Game 6.”

    The Lakers
shot 27 free throws in the fourth quarter and scored 16 of their final
18 points at the foul line in a 106-102 victory. Lakers guard Kobe Bryant’s
elbow to Mike Bibby’s nose that was not called a foul with less than 20
seconds left “prompted many fans to start wondering about what was motivating
these officials,” the letter said. “Unless the NBA orders a review of this
game’s officiating, perceptions and suspicions, however presently absent
any evidence, will abound,” the letter continued.

    “Your
problem in addressing the pivotal Game 6 situation is that you have too
much power. Where else can decision-makers (the referees) escape all responsibility
to admit serious and egregious error and have their bosses (you) fine those
wronged (the players and coaches) who dare to speak out critically? . .
. A review that satisfies the fans’ sense of fairness and deters future
recurrences would be a salutary contribution to the public trust that the
NBA badly needs.”

04 JUNE 02: THE LONELIEST
DOLPHIN

Georges, swimming with assorted
humans last month.

from CNN:

Amorous dolphin targeting swimmers

June 4, 2002 Posted: 8:04
AM EDT (1204 GMT)

WEYMOUTH, England — Swimmers
are being warned to stay away from a “sexually aggressive” dolphin that
has made its home at a popular tourist resort on the English south coast.

    Georges
the male bottlenose has become a tourist attraction since arriving in Weymouth
harbour, Dorset, in April. Thousands of people have gone out in boats to
watch him and swim with him.

    But the
10-year-old, 400 lbs (180 kg), dolphin became the cause for concern last
month when his behaviour suddenly became erratic.

    He appeared
to be trying to harm himself by swimming into boats’ propellers and began
showing an unhealthy interest in divers.

    Such
was the concern that Ric O’Barry, who worked as a trainer on the U.S. TV
show “Flipper,” was called in to try to get Georges to swim out to sea.

    But attempts
to lure Georges away from the busy harbour and return him to a secluded
area near Cherbourg, France, where it is thought he originated, failed.

    
Now experts have warned swimmers to avoid him, the Press Association reports.

    O’Barry,
who works with the World Society for the Protection of Animals, said: “Georges’s
well-documented sexual aggression poses a real threat to the thousands
of swimmers who will be descending on Weymouth over the summer.”

    He told
the London-based Times newspaper: “This dolphin does get very sexually
aggressive. He has already attempted to mate with some divers.

    “When
dolphins get sexually excited, they try to isolate a swimmer, normally
female. They do this by circling around the individual and gradually move
them away from the beach, boat or crowd of people.”

    O’Barry
said the dolphin would get very excited and rough before trying to mate
with a swimmer, possibly causing them to drown.

    The WSPA
wants to relocate Georges to France because it is illegal there for people
to swim or dive with a dolphin and it would be possible for a French group
of experts, the Cetacean study group, to continue monitoring him.

03 JUNE 02: “Wi-Fi”

Wild About Wi-Fi

Rising from the grass
roots, high-speed wireless Internet connections are springing up everywhere.
Tune in, turn on, get e-mail. Sometimes for free.

By Steven Levy and Brad
Stone

NEWSWEEK 

(June 10 issue)

 

Pete Shipley‚s dimly lit
Berkeley home has all the earmarks of a geek lair: scattered viscera of
discarded computer systems, exotic pieces of electronic-surveillance equipment
and videos of the BBC sci-fi „Red Dwarf‰ show. But among the hacker community,
Shipley, a 36-year-old freelance security consultant, is best known for
his excursions outside the home˜as a pioneer of „war driving.‰

    BREATHE
EASY: this isn‚t a „Sum of All Fears‰ kind of thing. War driving involves
roaming around a neighborhood looking for the increasingly numerous „hot
spots‰ where high-speed Internet access is beamed to a small area by a
low-power radio signal, thanks to a scheme called Wireless Fidelity. Imagine
your computer as a walkie-talkie, but instead of talking, you‚re getting
high-speed Internet access. Wi-Fi, as it‚s generally called (propellerheads
call it 802.11b), has unexpectedly emerged as the wireless world‚s Maltese
Falcon, something truly lustworthy and, once possessed, impossible to let
go of.

      
Two million people use it now, a number expected to double by next year,
according to Gartner, Inc. And International Data Corp. predicts that public
hot spots will jump from a current 3,000 to more than 40,000 by 2006. Consumers
use Wi-Fi to establish wireless networks in their homes; businesses adopt
it to untether employees from desktops, and techno-nomads celebrate its
presence in cafes (from Starbucks to Happy Donuts), airports and hotel
lobbies. (Next on the docket: airplanes.) It seems that moving megabytes
on the move is almost mystical, like an out-of-body experience. „Once you
are untethered from a wall it becomes like candy; it‚s a really insatiable
appetite,‰ says Michael Chaplo, the CEO of one Wi-Fi start-up. „You just
want it everywhere.‰ Like the early Internet, Wi-Fi is a jaw-dropping technology
with unlimited promise. Also like the Internet, it opens up a rat‚s nest
of security woes.

      
There‚s nothing like a war drive to expose both sides of this cutting-edge
sword. Shipley Velcroes two weird-looking antennae to a NEWSWEEK reporter‚s
car, and connects them to a Lucent wireless card plugged into a Fujitsu
Tablet PC. He boots a program called Net Stumbler, which transforms the
system into a sniffing machine, capable of detecting Wi-Fi networks with
the reliability of a drug beagle, and we‚re off. Almost instantly, the
rig starts finding networks˜16 of them within the first three blocks (last
year Shipley was getting just two). Turning toward the campus, name after
name of wireless setups scroll by, some set up by corporations, some by
… well, who knows? Cal Bears Network … V Street Network … Henry Household.
About half of the more than 200 networks he finds are unprotected by encryption
or access control, meaning that anyone passing by could potentially grab
the data. Or a freeloader could plant himself in front of the network owner‚s
house and send out thousands of spam e-mails, leaving the owner to take
the heat.

       
This is not just a West Coast phenomenon: a war-driving security specialist
in Omaha, Neb., recently found 59 hot spots, 37 of them unprotected. And
on a war walk through New York‚s Greenwich Village last week, NEWSWEEK
found more than 50 hot spots in a quarter-hour. A disturbing security situation˜in
effect, it‚s like opening a drive-in window to an otherwise firewall-protected
network˜but also an exhilarating opportunity. Without knowing exactly who
was beaming out the broadband, it was possible to stand on a random street
corner and grab sports scores and e-mail. The Internet was in the air.

       
That‚s only one irony in the Wi-Fi revolution: while most of the tech industry
gripes about how hard it is to provide high-speed Internet access, seemingly
out of nowhere a technology has emerged to do just that, at low cost or
even for free. And without those nasty wires! The secret of Wi-Fi comes
from its mongrel origins. Wireless technology is actually a kind of radio,
and different devices run on different frequencies on the radio bandwidth.
Some portions are hotly contested, and governments reserve their use for
favored parties: in some cases, like cellular phones, firms pay billions
to use portions of the spectrum. No one pays a penny for Wi-Fi, which springs
from a semi-orphaned frequency range formerly known as the Industrial,
Scientific and Medical Band, designated for humble appliances like cordless
phones and microwave ovens. (It‚s around 2.4 gigahertz, for those keeping
score at home.) This junk spectrum is unlicensed, meaning that as long
as you keep the power low, no one limits your activity. This freedom appealed
to computer people, who see it as an open invitation to innovate and experiment.
As a result, cool things keep happening with Wi-Fi.

      
A lot of this still goes on among the geek set. For instance, Rob Flickenger,
author of „Building Wireless Community Networks,‰ has gained renown for
designing a long-range $6.45 Wi-Fi antenna housed in a Pringles potato-chip
can. (It‚s been recently outperformed by an antenna made out of a Big Chunk
beef-stew can.)

      
But even as the wireheads build their toys, serious companies sense big
money. Things really began to take off three years ago when Apple adopted
Wi-Fi for its home-networking AirPort device. Simply plug your Internet
cable into the flying-saucer-shaped gizmo, and your Macs (if equipped with
a $99 wireless card) instantly become wireless Net machines. Last year
Microsoft rolled out its new Windows XP operating system with built-in
Wi-Fi support: every time an XP user with a wireless card gets within sniffing
range of a network, a little dialogue box pops up and asks if he or she
wants to hook up. And this year IBM began shipping ThinkPad computers with
Wi-Fi built in.

    Dozens
of start-up companies hope to ride the Wi-Fi wave. Boingo wants to be at
the center of a sprawling Wi-Fi archipelago. It offers customers service
at hundreds˜one day maybe millions, dreams CEO Sky Dayton (who earlier
founded Earthlink)˜of hot spots signed on to the Boingo system. In return,
Boingo handles the billing and kicks back part of the user fees. A company
called Joltage provides software to turn hot spots into instant mini-Internet
service providers. Other firms are working to go beyond hot spots to larger
„hot zones,‰ like WiFi Metro, which has placed antennas in Palo Alto and
San Jose, Calif., to blanket six-block areas in a single network. Going
a step further are companies attempting „mesh networks‰ to create hot regions.
For instance, a company called SkyPilot wants to Wi-Fi the suburbs by hopscotching
bandwidth from computer to computer: sort of a Napster approach to connectivity.

       
While entrepreneurs envision hot spots in their bank accounts, some people
are organizing on the principle that connectivity in the air should be
as free as the breeze. In more than 50 cities and towns, community-based
network groups are setting up regions where people are encouraged to partake
of free wireless Internet. NYC Wireless has more than 60 „guerrilla installations,‰
including Tompkins Square Park in the East Village. In Pittsburgh, you
can Web-surf for free in Mellon and Market Squares.

        
Traditional broadband providers cry foul when users take their cable modem
or DSL connections and beam them to friends, family and passsers-by through
Wi-Fi networks. „It constitutes a theft of service per our user agreement,‰
says AT&T Broadband‚s Sarah Eder. But at least one very important observer
doesn‚t buy that. „I don‚t think it‚s stealing by any definition of law
at the moment,‰ says FCC chairman Michael Powell. „The truth is, it‚s an
unintended use.‰

      
Wi-Fi‚s success has already made some telecom companies like Nokia and
Nextel realize that their future lies in complementing, not competing,
with Wi-Fi. The new vision involves a hybrid scheme where people would
do heavy-duty computing in low-cost, high-activity Wi-Fi hot zones, and
then, when they drove out to the desert, or visited North Dakota, they‚d
stay connected, using a more costly (licensed bandwidth) 3G-cellular network.
Performing this trick without fiddling with the computer˜a so-called vertical
handoff˜is „the holy grail,‰ says AT&T researcher Paul Henry. „It would
mean that wherever you were, the Internet would be there, too.‰

      
This would require superior security software. But it will take some effort
from users. The current form of protection, an encryption code called WEP,
is far from perfect, but a lot of people don‚t even bother to turn it on.
Nonetheless, experts assume that, like the Internet, Wi-Fi will manage
to increase˜if not perfect˜its security so that problems won‚t stunt its
growth.

       
No matter who provides the signal, the Wi-Fi revolution is now moving to
a fascinating stage, where the medium affects behavior. Putting wireless
nets in businesses has affected culture in places like Microsoft and IBM,
where people trundle into meetings with laptops, pull up relevant information
on the spot˜and surf the Net if they‚re bored. An in-house video at Cisco
Systems tells the tale of an engineer who discovered a toilet-paper shortage
in the men‚s room˜and was able to order more online while maintaining his
position.

      
And when the Internet is ultimately everywhere, imagine the effects on
journalism when, as tech columnist Dan Gillmor has speculated, hundreds
of witnesses to a local disaster have the ability to capture and send out
instant digital photos and videos.

      
All that from junk spectrum? Hard to believe. But not too long ago surfing
the Internet seemed as weird as, well, war driving.

02 JUNE
02: WHAT CHURCH IS FOR.

(above) This past unday,
Emmanuel Church, Greater of Manchester, England,

opened its doors to worshippers
and World Cup fans.

01 JUNE 02: “If you are
a goalkeeper, maybe you put an elephant tooth in your boot to make you
big and strong.”

Magic of the Cup

Muti, marabouts, and
witch doctors – all bad for game’s image

Sunday February 10, 2002

The
Observer

A semi-final that featured
three shots hitting the woodwork, three red cards, a missed penalty, three
goals and several on-field punch-ups would normally have made all the headlines,
but not last Thursday.

    All the
above happened in the first semi-final of the African Cup of Nations, when
Senegal surprised Nigeria by winning 2-1 in Bamako’s Stade Modibo Keita,
but the game was utterly overshadowed by events before kick-off a few miles
across town at the Stade du Mars 26, where Cameroon were preparing to take
on the host nation, Mali, in the second semi-final.

    As Alassane
Diao was scuffing the winner seven minutes into extra-time for the Lions
of Senegal, the Cameroon coach, Winfried Schafer, and his assistant, Thomas
Nkono, found themselves being arrested by Malian police, ostensibly for
trying
to place a magic charm on the pitch before the game.

    For the
Confederation of African Football, for whom this tournament is their global
showpiece, the incident could hardly have been more embarrassing. Schafer
– banned from the bench today for abusing a match commissioner – diplomatically
played down the incident, but CAF are desperate to throw off the Third
World image that they believe was a major factor in the decision not to
award South Africa the 2006 World Cup.

    ‘We are
no more willing to see witch doctors on the pitch than cannibals at the
concession stands,’ a CAF spokesman said. ‘Image is everything.’ But belief
in traditional religions still exists, nowhere more so than in Senegal,
where many attribute the rapid rise of French coach Bruno Metsu’s side
as much to the work of marabouts – the heads of local Islamic brotherhoods
who effectively act as intermediaries between believers and Allah – as
to their coach’s tactical nous.

    Two years
ago in the Nations Cup quarter-final in Lagos, Senegal, having taken an
early lead, looked to be holding on when, 15 minutes from time, a former
official of the Nigerian FA raced on to the pitch and seized a ‘charm’
that had been lying in the back of the Senegal net. Senegal protested,
but to no avail, and Nigeria went on to score twice and win. The official
was subsequently banned, but his action was seen as hugely significant
in Nigeria’s progress. This time around, Senegalese journalists insist
they saw a marabout smearing goalkeeper Tony Sylva’s post with an ointment
ahead of the Lions’ 1-0 victory over Zambia in the group stages. Sylva
went 448 minutes without conceding a goal.

    Freddie
Saddam is widely recognised as being South Africa’s most loyal fan and
his trip to Mali was financed by the South African FA. ‘I didn’t used to
think anything of muti [fetishism],’ he says, ‘but now I know it to be
true.’ He is in no doubt that the dearth of goals in Mali – 47 in 30 games
before yesterday’s third-place play-off – is down to the influence of the
witch doctors. ‘It is not normal,’ he says. ‘If you are a goalkeeper, maybe
you put an elephant tooth in your boot to make you big and strong. How
do you score past a man who is like an elephant?’

    Elephant
teeth are readily available at the fetish market just south of the Stade
Modibo Keita, a bargain at 2000CFA a pop (£2). A monkey’s head costs
2,500CFA, a cayman’s head 7,500 and porcupine quills 5,000 a bundle. Last
August African Soccer magazine ran a 10-page investigation into witchcraft
in football, detailing animal sacrifices, self-mutilation, casting of spells,
lucky charms, odious concoctions and a one-hour delay at an international
match while teams argued about who would be first to step on to the pitch.

    One South
African player recalls: ‘There was a time when things weren’t going well
for our team [one of the biggest in the country] and a director put us
all on a bus out into the bush. They cut the top off this big termite mound,
dug all the earth from inside and poured this muti mixture in. We all had
to bathe naked in it and walk back to the bus without walking backwards
at any time.’ Results improved. Mamadou, the fetishism store-owner in Bamako,
is unsure about what each item does, though he insists ‘many, many footballers’
go to his store.

    ‘I am
just the pharmacist, not the doctor,’ he says. Adama Dore, though, is an
expert. He is a magic-man from a village just outside Bamako, who deals
with 30-40 customers a week. His son, Aboubaka, is a promising youth player
for French side FC Paris – a rise, Dore insists, that has been much aided
by his magic.

    Dore
also claims that France’s World Cup victory four years ago, far from resulting
from the defensive pairing of Marcel Desailly and Laurent Blanc, the skills
of Zinedine Zidane or the pace of Thierry Henry, was largely down to the
spells of Aguib Sosso, a Malian witch-doctor who died two years ago. Dore
and Saddam both feel it is unfair that the CAF should have decided to ban
the muti-men. ‘Will they ban Catholic players crossing themselves?’ Saddam
asks, spittle flying from the wide gap between his front teeth. ‘Will they
shut the chapel at Barcelona? If you believe, muti makes you stronger.’

    The editor
of African Soccer, Emmanuel Maradas, says football only reflects the society
in which it exists. But it is embarrassing for the image of the game in
Africa, he believes, that so much time and money is devoted to witchcraft.

    Whatever
they believe in, mental strength is something Senegal have in abundance,
as they proved in the semi-final when they put behind them the first-half
dismissal of Birahim Sarr to overcome Nigeria. El-Hadji Diouf, twisting,
turning and full of tricks, is their undoubted star, but he is aware of
just how important the team ethic is.

    ‘I know
that everyone in Senegal says El-Hadji Diouf is the star of Senegalese
football, but I don’t agree, because the real star is the group and the
solidarity within the group,’ says the Lens striker. That sense of unity,
born of the fact that nearly the entire squad are based in France, has
been carefully nurtured by Metsu, whose laissez-faire approach to discipline
has had its critics, but has, thus far, undeniably worked. His counterpart
this afternoon could hardly be more different.

    Schafer
knows he was appointed largely to be as stereotypically German as he could
be. ‘I have never doubted the individual ability of my players, but when
I took over they lacked self-belief, tactical discipline and organisation,’
he explained. They have those qualities now. Cameroon in Mali have been
dull, muscular and brutally efficient. They are yet to concede a goal in
the tournament, are top-scorers with nine, and appear to be peaking at
the right time – if a little too reliant on the dead-ball skills and assists
of Real Madrid’s Geremi. Even without the injured Patrick Mboma, the Cup’s
joint top scorer with three goals, they turned in their best performance
in the competition in the semi-final. Mboma is fit again today.

    Should
Cameroon repeat their triumph of two years ago they will become the first
side since Ghana in 1965 to retain the African Nations, a hiatus Schafer
sees as a challenge rather than a burden. ‘Cameroon have never before done
well as defending champions,’ he said. ‘They have never done well in a
World Cup year: this is simply another hurdle to overcome.’ Dore, though,
is backing Senegal. ‘I have seen that a West African side will win,’ he
says.

    Schafer
overcame the riot police; it remains to be seen whether German single-mindedness
can overcome Dore’s metaphysics.

31 MAY 02: SOCCER
AND THE JUJU MEN

From LATimes:

Recipe for Victory: Hard Work and Pigeon
Blood

African soccer teams
rely on medicine men to ward off evil spirits and enemy shots, to the dismay
of some game administrators.

by DAVAN MAHARAJ, TIMES
STAFF WRITER

NAIROBI, Kenya — When the
four soccer teams from sub-Saharan Africa take the field for their World
Cup matches starting today, they will receive the usual support from coaches,
trainers and, in all likelihood, “team advisors” who are actually traditional
healers known as juju men.

    The juju
men won’t be offering tips on game strategy. Their job will be to facilitate
a win by discreetly scattering charms on the field, putting hexes on opponents
and smearing their teams’ goalposts with magic potions to keep the ball
out.

    Although
juju men are commonplace at African soccer matches, their presence–and
influence–has been such an embarrassment that the sport’s governing body
in Africa recently banned such “team advisors” from being part of a squad’s
official entourage.

    “Image
is everything,” stated the Cairo-based Confederation of African Football
before the African Nations Cup in January in Mali. The group said it instituted
the ban to avoid presenting “a Third World image” during the continent’s
premier sporting event.

    “We are
no more willing to see witch doctors on the [field] than cannibals at the
concession stands,” the CAF declared in a statement that caused juju men
from Senegal to South Africa to howl in protest.

    “They
are throwing out the baby with the bathwater just because some soccer administrators
wish to appease the white man more than honor African culture,” one traditional
healer from Swaziland responded.

    So far,
only the South African Football Assn. has announced that no traditional
healers would “officially” accompany its World Cup squad to Japan and South
Korea.

    But soccer
commentators doubt that South Africa and the three other African countries–Nigeria,
Senegal and Cameroon–would leave their juju men home.

    “To depart
for an international competition without consulting or including sorcerers
is akin to going to an exam without a pencil,” the authoritative African
Soccer magazine said in a recent issue.

    The CAF
and, indeed, many Africans frown on juju, saying it has no role in modern
soccer. Since the CAF ban, columnists, soccer analysts and fans have been
debating in newspapers, Web sites and chat rooms about the efficacy of
juju and its history in African soccer.

    Many
fans agree that for the teams to be successful, they need to combine skill
and rigorous training with soccer savvy. But those who discount soccer
sorcery do so at their own peril. Just ask the Elephants.

    In 1992,
Ivory Coast, whose soccer team is nicknamed the Elephants, won the African
Nations Cup in a nail-biting penalty shootout against Ghana. Many Ivorians
credited the victory to a band of juju men enlisted by the sports minister
to give the national side an extra advantage.

    When
the minister reneged on promises to pay the juju men, they promptly slapped
a hex on their national team. The result: a dismal 10-year slide for the
Elephants.

    Only
last month, Defense Minister Moise Lida Kouassi went to the juju men’s
village to beg forgiveness and make amends.

    “I’m
offering a bottle of liquor and the sum of” $2,000, he said, “so that the
village, through the perceptiveness of its wise men, will continue to help
the republic and, in particular, the minister of sport.” Africans are quick
to point out that players from Western nations practice their own form
of juju when they wear lucky charms, pray before an important match, cross
themselves after the national anthem or form a ritual huddle.

    Even
basketball superstar Michael Jordan could be accused of practicing a little
juju for wearing his old University of North Carolina shorts under his
NBA uniform.

    But in
Africa, there is little subtlety when it comes to superstitions.

    In a
10-page special report, African Soccer magazine recently documented how
teams splatter pigeons’ blood around the dressing room to ward off evil
spirits, bury the remains of animals in their opponents’ half of the field,
and sacrifice cows, goats and other animals to collect blood for players
to bathe in.

    Some
teams even slash their own players’ bodies with razor blades to rub a “magic
dust” into their bloodstream.

    “I used
to get cut so much I was just like a ventilator,” a former South African
player said. “They used to cut us everywhere…. They would use the same
razor blade on everyone.”

    Another
former Ivory Coast star recounted how at a previous African Nations Cup,
about 150 juju men set up camp in their hotel rooms, making players take
baths in large pots filled with various concoctions. Despite the elaborate
juju rituals, the Ivorians were kicked out in the first round, losing to
Egypt and Cameroon.

    Defenders
of soccer sorcery say that juju men merely psych up players. They are no
different from the sport psychologists that many U.S. professional teams
maintain on their staff.

    Jackson
Ambani claims to have motivated some of the best players in East Africa
during his 40-year career as a juju man.

    The chalkboard
tacked up to the front door of his one-room shack in the sprawling Kangemi
slum outside Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, advertises Ambani’s day job as one
of the hundreds of thousands of faith healers throughout Africa. They use
herbs and prayer to ancestral spirits to cure malaria, gonorrhea, even
lovesickness.

    During
the soccer season, Ambani is in high demand. The top soccer clubs in Kenya
and even coaches from the national team come calling, supplying Ambani
with the names of the opposing teams’ players.

    This
week, the 74-year-old Ambani demonstrated how he puts the names in a small
terra-cotta urn, pours in the blood of chickens, goats and other animals,
and sprinkles in some of his special magic dust, which he keeps in a plastic
Skippy peanut butter container. After plugging the holes in the urn with
some goat horns, Ambani fires up the brew on a kerosene stove.

    “When
I do this, even though the other team may have good players, they will
never perform well,” he said, breaking out in broad grin. “They will miss
the ball and see things that are not on the field. I am a spoiler.”

    On some
occasions, Ambani slips into soccer stadiums at dawn to plant bones and
parts of animals at “essential places” in the field.

    For his
services, Ambani charges from about $20 to as much as $2,000–depending
on the level of the game.

    Ambani,
who said he wore No. 7 when he played for his village soccer team in western
Kenya, said he enjoyed working and talking sports with soccer players.
But since he purchased a cellular phone, his business has become a virtual
Dial-a-Juju. His clients now simply telephone in their order. When they
don’t pay, he reverses the hex on them.

    Nicholas
Musonye, secretary-general of the Council of East and Central Africa Football
Assns., which runs soccer in 13 countries, said he has urged his members
to stay away from Ambani many times, to no avail.

    Across
Africa, Musonye said, football associations use their sizable “research
budgets” to hire witch doctors and keep them happy. Musonye lamented that
the same groups pay their players small stipends and fail to correct their
poor diet or replace their ragged uniforms.

    “Juju
doesn’t work,” Musonye said. “The road to success lies in hard work, hard
work and more hard work.”

    He chuckled,
then said: “If juju worked, then African teams would win the World Cup
every four years, but that still hasn’t happened once.”

30 MAY 02: “AND LET THERE
BE CONSUMERS! MADE IN OUR OWN IMAGE!”